She lingers for a while, watching the fires, wondering how many living in the city below had any notion of what they portended, of the different world that would greet them on the dawn, a now-familiar fugue of confusion settling over her mind.
The fires are smaller when she comes back to herself, the confusion fading. How long has she stood here? She turns to one of the swordsmen, the one who had killed the greyhead, finding him viewing her with open admiration, his eyes lingering where the slit in her gown reveals a length of thigh. “Do you know what you are?” she asks him.
“Arisai,” he replies, meeting her gaze with a grin. “A servant of the Ally.”
“No.” She turns back to the city. “You are a slave. In the morning I will be an empress, but also a slave. For we are all slaves now.”
She is moving to the stairs when it strikes her, the sensation of his return falling like a hammerblow. She staggers, falling to her knees. Beloved! Her song swells in welcome and foreboding, the same notes it has always sung in his presence. He is close, she can feel it, the ocean no longer between them. Beloved, do you come to me?
The song shifts as it touches his hatred, his sweet hatred, a vision coming to her mind, foggy but clear enough to discern a stretch of coastline, tall waves breaking on a rocky shore, a single word in his voice, his wonderful hate-filled voice: Eskethia.
• • •
“Reminds me of southern Cumbrael,” Draker said, shielding his eyes from the sun as he surveyed the landscape. “Did some smuggling there in my youth.”
Eskethia did indeed bear some resemblance to the Realm’s driest region, and seemed similarly rich in vineyards, rows of neatly ordered vines stretching away across the rolling hills, interspersed with an occasional villa or farm building. Frentis glanced back at the Sea Sabre, wallowing in the morning tide. Belorath had been obliged to land them when the shore was clear of waves to avoid smashing them onto the rocks, resting the hull on the sands before they disembarked. “I’ll ask the gods to favour your mission,” the captain had called down to Frentis from the stern, casting a wary eye at the shore, his final words a barely heard mutter, “though I doubt even they could preserve you here.”
“I put us fifty miles south of New Kethia,” Thirty-Four advised, examining an unfurled map. “If the captain’s reckoning is to be trusted.”
“Good navigation is about the only thing I’d trust a Meldenean with.” Frentis’s gaze tracked to the nearest villa, perhaps a quarter mile off with outbuildings large enough to be stables.
“It’ll be home to a black-clad,” Thirty-Four said, following his gaze. “Too grand for anything else. They are likely to have guards; house Varitai. An estate this large will keep perhaps a dozen.”
“All to the good.” Frentis gave the sign for the company to adopt the loose skirmish formation he had taught them in the Urlish. “We need to start somewhere.”
They managed to take a Varitai alive, a guard posted on the villa’s western side, roped and beaten down by Draker with Thirty-Four’s assistance. His comrades were not so fortunate, running to confront them with weapons drawn when a panicked slave gave the alarm, screaming shrilly of bandits as she fled back to the house. Frentis had ordered no chances taken and the fight was short, half the Varitai cut down by their arrows and Illian’s crossbow before the company closed in with drawn swords to finish the others.
